1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to communication systems and more particularly to a communication receiver such as a paging receiver for receiving, storing, and displaying paging information.
2. Background Discussion
Communication systems in general and paging systems in particular using transmitted call signals having attained widespread use for calling selected receivers to transmit information from a base station transmitter to the receivers. Modern paging receivers have achieved multifunction capabilities through the use of microcomputers which allow the paging receiver to respond to information having various combinations of tone, tone and voice, or data messages. The information is transmitted using any number of paging coding schemes and message formats. Additionally, these prior art paging receivers also provide such features as storing the data messages in a memory of the paging receiver for allowing the user to recall messages at a later time. Other features have been the ability of paging receivers to selectively recall a message and display it for the paging user.
A typical prior art memory display pager stores a plurality of received data messages in a memory of the paging receiver. A particular problem with these prior art paging receivers is a situation when the word length of a message exceeds the capacity of the display due to the small space available for the display. In these prior art paging receivers, such as U.S. Pat. No. 3,976,995, one remedy is to display a portion of the received message at a time and then marquee the message on a per-character basis from one end of the display array towards the other. However, this type of marqueeing demands rapid eye movement and renders the message less intelligible than information perceived on a per-word or word group basis.
Other prior art paging receivers, such as U.S. Pat. No. 4,646,081, display a portion of the received message as a screen at a time and then scrolls the message on a per screen basis in a fixed order where each screen contains a different portion of the message. However, the screen may contain broken word formats or clipped words which creates difficult reading for the user. Furthermore, this type of scrolling has been done at a constant scroll rate without regard to the informational content of the screen. Since each screen may contain different information, the paging user has been required to scroll through the screens repeatedly to perceive all the information in the message.